Smokescreen said:
"Or, rather, I'm unsatisfied when I'm not playing, which isn't the same. "Addictive" is used as a synonym for "good," but these games aren't good, only compelling. You don't exactly have fun playing; you just feel bad when you stop."
which is very well said but again, doesn't tie into the rest of the article.
Your article is scattershot and could've focused on either a) your addiction to this thing or b) what a dick the guy is who made it but instead tries to jokily play off all the things you didn't do.
And while I'll admit my initial post was very harsh it doesn't take away from what my point is; namely, that I understood exactly what you were doing when you wrote
"I meant to document more Mafia Wars abuses, but the truth is I've been too busy playing it" and what you were doing wasn't that good.
to be honest, there's very, very little to the game itself. it's almost JRPG in it's climb to level, collect infinite amounts of detritus, and objects become trivialised by continual upgrade paths. there are better JRPG's, and there are better games as well.
personally, the greater issue is that all the games share a common API, making the possibility of zynga being infinitely more voracious with social networking games in the future, especially if nobody notices that all the games play almost identically. While farmville has a very different flash interface, it still shares a lot of the economy mechanics of the previous games, each game's IGE relies on effort/reward to install itself as a compulsion, rather than as a pure achievement reward, there's a continual emptiness of achievement, the hollow victory of achieveng a level, of gaining coins and killing vampires and running a mission 20x to gain 'mastery', to socially promote yourself and the medium.
to be sure, it's a cash-cow for someone, and both the active playerbase, and in tandem, the use of microtransactions is something that every other game company in the world is looking at as an example of corporate currency for videogaming.
which, for escapist is something that should be scutinised as being wholly bad for the industry as a whole. besides that, the implementation of GF points/rewards systems in mafia wars and in farmville, where it's not as evident, deflating the core mechanism of the game in order to promote 3rd parties and buy your way ahead should be more alarming. but, everyone knows about DLC. rock band has DLC. everyone loves rock band, so everyone should love DLC. QED ?
yeah. fridge logic. i should also point out that mafia wars is essentially a very simple game to cheat with as well. given the amazing influence, it's trivial enough that you can have a greasemonkey script installed that will progressively play the game for you, process all the thousands of spammed "look at me playing mafia wars" home-feed items, and collect the takings, fight players, declare wars, etc.
for a greasemonkey script, it should not have more than a million users. arguably. but it almost really does have that many users, simply because the staged progression is almost monotonous and very tedious. and for players who have been on longer than the first month, you'll find that a significant amount of the 500 odd 'friends' do have bots playing instead of people, who can do shared jobs in under a second of you posting to your social interface, etc.
as a social mechanic to the game, knowing there's a good chance that 1 in 10 is a bot, makes the AI/NPC interaction a more complex animal, since you're not really playing against zynga's bad code, or shoddy API's, the reliance on collecting newer, better, more trivial rewards to boost your attack rating by 5, to reach 31,000 means nothing when you can be completely mobbed by a repeat attack from a player with 60k attack, who didn't even notice you were there, they were probably at school, daycare, their job, watching tv, replacing diapers, doing laundry, eating lunch, etc.
having the game overrun with bots is problematic. you can still collect the ~300,000 (inventory items are ranked by weapon/armor/vehicle, the attack/defense value is weighted, so only the first 500 items apply, and better weapons become rarer drops, i.e. 1/100 to 1/500 to 1/1000, etc. rewards) items in the game needed to progressively defend yourself against casual and concerted attacks, but it takes time. time most people don't want to spend. and can't spend. won't spend either. it is after all, a game.
in MW, it's progressive effort, extended over years. i.e. you can get to level 500 in 2 weeks or 3 months or 2 years, even level 1000, or higher. but it's meaningless to a degree. the game relies heavily on the JPRG fight mechanic, and allows twinking characters, i.e. a much older account gifts 500 overpowered items to a new account that only fights other characters, etc. putting twinks against bots, means little, since both players are essentially driven there by the flaws in the social mechanics, reward mechanics, and the fight mechanics of the game. and while zynga might address some issues, MW is their ball of wax construct that makes them money, they will not fix any of the problems of their little machination while it still makes money for the lower rung players who think they can progress through the system as it stands.
i don't even know if you can leave mafia wars in facebook, it's not really an option. you can ignore the postings, and you can disband from the group invites, and ignore all the application warnings, but it's still there. they still know who you are. those 2,000 people you might charitably call 'people'/'friends' will still be there, waiting for you to fight in some random scuffle against 6 other random people, waiting for you to send them some trivial reward to feel obligated to play, etc.
